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Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
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COLLEEN EVANS
This mama mallard is a frequent visitor to Georgetown.
One duck’s got a Ritzy lifestyle
For the past six years, a mama mallard has made the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown her nesting spot — much to the relief of the hotel’s energetic publicist,
Colleen Evans. “Are you
kidding?” she said. “I would die if she didn’t come back. It’s the cute factor. And you know what? Anytime you take care of nature, it’s good karma for the hotel.” “Ritzy” arrived around Easter
to lay 10 eggs in one of the courtyard planters, right on cue for Evans’s duck-centric PR juggernaut: A signature cocktail (“Duck, Duck, Goose”), velvet ropes around the planter, a “Shhh.Mother duck nesting” sign. Duck is conspicuously off the menu.
Cute duckling stories have a
way of ending badly, but Evans has successfully crisis-managed this one over the years. Security cameras and guards watch out for hawks and other perils. And when the ducklings hatch, a “duck whisperer” (really) holds the mama while the babies are placed into a box, and they are all transported via limo to the banks of the Potomac. VID treatment, she calls it: Very Important Duck. “That’s why this duck is a smart duck,” Evans told us.
SURREAL ESTATE
ennifer Griffin turns 41 on Tuesday, and you won’t hear any “over-the-hill” jokes from her. “Forty looks mighty good and mighty young and mighty
JENNIFER GRIFFIN
Jennifer Griffin says her Marine-camouflage “woobie” gives her comfort and strength through her battle with breast cancer.
awesome after what we have been through,” she told us. In September, eight months after giving birth to her third child, the Fox News Pentagon correspondent was given a diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive and deadly form of the disease that hits younger women. Last week, after months of chemo and a double mastectomy, she got the all-clear from her oncologist. The good news was almost as shocking for her and husband Greg Myre as her sudden diagnosis: “I think we are still in shock from both, frankly.” Griffin chronicled her journey on a blog that she started to stay in touch with a few close girlfriends; it exploded in readership after she went on NBC’s “Today” show in February to talk about the disease. The blog soon became a hub for women with triple-negative. “It helped me get outside of myself and in the process,” she said. “If it could help other women, then that is what motivated me to keep going.” Military pals lent support, notably with a combat “woobie” — a Marine camouflage sleeping bag, the kind guards drape over their shoulders while on duty on a cold night. “Every time I think that I am in a little pain from the double mastectomy, I think of them and put on my running shoes. Greg says I’ll be doing one-arm push-ups before anyone knows it.” Next: radiation treatments, a few more surgeries to reconstruct her breasts, a summer hugging her kids. Then she plans to head back to work, covering national security for Fox. “I can’t wait to start traveling again and jumping out of BlackHawks and flying high on adrenaline, because I have been given a second chance,” she said. She’ll also become an ambassador for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure at its first race in Israel this fall. Was she joking when she told us she wants to take her new breasts over to a “Dancing With the Stars” tryout? “It would be a shame to waste all this plastic surgery!” she said.
Sellers: Antawn and Ione Jamison
Asking price: $4.15 million
Details: Still unclear what the Wizards shake-up will mean for their game — or for D.C.’s high-end real estate market. The power forward bought his Bethesda mansion in November ’08 for $3.9million. Now he’s put it on the market (as first noted by the UrbanTurf blog) for an amount that would certainly buy a lot in Cleveland, where he’s been traded; even here, it gets you six bedrooms, seven full baths, six fireplaces, a four-car garage, sauna, steam room, a movie theater, an elevator . . . and a closet the size of your first apartment.
MONDAY, APRIL 19, 2010
JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Antawn Jamison’s saying goodbye to his Bethesda home.
HEY, ISN’T THAT . . .
Harry Reid exiting Restaurant
Nora on Friday night with a dog- gie bag. Though if it’s from Nora, you’re probably not giving it to the dog.
Janet Napolitano (and security
detail) catching the Saturday night production of “Master Class,” starring Tyne Daly, at the Kennedy Center.
GOT A TIP ? E-MAIL U S A T RELIABLESOURCE@WASHP OST . COM. FOR THE LA TEST SCOOPS, VISIT WASHINGTONP OST . COM/RELIABLESOUR CE
BOOK WORLD
A novel from the coal mines: Darkness at the end of the tunnel
by Patrick Anderson
sion or fire or flood far under the ground; wives and children gathered at the mine’s entrance; unseen men who may yet be alive; a rescue effort that moves all too slowly; sometimes, the miracle of survi- vors brought out alive — and sometimes not; stoicism and funerals; calls for re- form that fade as they con- front the realities of coal-state politics. Then, after a few years, the tragedy unfolds again in some other corner of Appalachia. Gardiner Harris’s powerful
T
first novel, “Hazard,” takes us beyond these familiar images. He starts with a disaster underground, but his goal is to show us the day-to-day real- ity of men who mine coal and the women who share their dangerous lives. Harris is well qualified to tell the story. Now a reporter for the New York Times, he previously worked for four years in Hazard, Ky., as the Eastern Kentucky bureau chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal. His prize- winning reporting there was credited with helping pass laws that strengthened the state’s mine-safety rules. In his novel’s opening pages, Amos Ble-
he recent West Virginia mine dis- aster repeated a tragedy we have seen far too many times: an explo-
and grazes Blevins before crushing Rob Crane, one of the few black miners in the area. The mine starts filling with water. Blevins can’t remove the block of coal that has trapped Crane and watches help- lessly as he drowns. He does manage to carry another injured miner to safety. Blevins is a hero, if only briefly. Will Murphy, the novel’s other main
character, is an investigator with MSHA, the federal Mine Safety and Health Ad- ministration. He questions the survivors of what at first appears to be a tragic acci- dent: water from an old mine nearby that somehow broke through into the active mine. But Murphy’s suspicions are aroused by signs that the dis- aster might have been planned. It happens that Will Murphy’s estranged brother, Paul, owns the mine — and the black miner who drowned was Will’s best friend. Neither Blevins nor Mur-
HAZARD
By Gardiner Harris Minotaur. 357 pp. $25.99
phy is perfectly cast as a hero. Blevins raises marijuana on the side and, when one of his partners threatens him, he re- sponds brutally. Blevins’s wife is addicted to prescription drugs, and he beats a police-
vins is working 15 stories underground in a mine near Hazard. The scene recalls George Orwell’s comment on England’s coal mines: “Most of the things one imag- ines in hell are there — heat, noise, confu- sion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.” Blevins is pushing a machine that claws at a vein of coal when suddenly “a block of coal about the size of a stove shot out of the wall”
man who tries to arrest her. After that, he spends much of the novel on the run from the law. Murphy, for his part, blames himself for causing a mine dis- aster 10 years earlier — by lighting a ciga- rette when he shouldn’t have — that killed another of his brothers. He’s an al- coholic with a broken marriage who may be stumbling toward salvation as he tries to find out the truth about this new dis- aster that claimed nine lives. Harris understands the fatalism of miners who know their jobs can kill them. He has Blevins reflect, “If the mountain wanted to take you, there was little you could do about it. Best thing
was to pray to God and run like hell when the roof started to fall.”Harris also values the beauty of Appalachia, as when Mur- phy visits an oddly, perhaps aptly, named little community: “Will looked up the hollow and realized that, if you ignored the trash in the creek, Hell-for-Certain was beautiful.” It’s a nice image of a blighted paradise. Corruption is pervasive in the world
Harris presents — among miners, mine owners, politicians and police. The mine inspectors in Murphy’s office solicit cash “donations” from the owners and, if they aren’t paid, pile on citations that can close a mine temporarily. When Murphy speaks out against these bribes, he’s warned that he could pay with his life for whistle-blowing. One of Murphy’s col- leagues tells him, “The politicians don’t want anyone to really investigate coal mining. If they did, they would have giv- en you a gun. They would have given you criminal penalties. They would have done something about collecting fines.” All this does not add up to a pretty pic- ture of the coal-mining world, but it’s a persuasive one, told with vivid prose, a fast pace and characters who live and breathe and bleed. If the recent West Vir- ginia disaster moves some readers to seek out “Hazard,” and better understand the hard lives miners live, at least some good will have come of it.
bookworld@washpost.com
Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for The Post.
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
© 2010 DREAMWORKS ANIMATION LLC.
TOUCH AND GO:Hiccup and Toothless the Dragon had some stiff competition, but “How to Train Your Dragon” still conquered the box office this weekend.
TOP 10 FILMS
It was another photo finish at the weekend box office, with a near-tie for the No. 1 spot between the animated adventure “How to Train Your Dragon” and the superhero comedy “Kick-Ass.” Here are the top movie ticket sales Friday through Sunday, with estimated weekend
receipts, and total receipts since the movie opened. The number of weeks opened is in parentheses.
Weekend Total
in millions of dollars
1. How to Train Your Dragon (4)
2. Kick-Ass (1)
3. Date Night (2)
4. Death at a Funeral (1) 5. Clash of the Titans (3) 6. The Last Song (3)
7. Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? (3) 8. Hot Tub Time Machine (4) 9. Alice in Wonderland (7) 10. The Bounty Hunter (5)
20.0 158.6 19.8 19.8 17.3 49.2 17.0 17.0 15.8 133.0 5.8 50.0 4.2 54.9 3.5 42.5 3.5 324.0 3.2 60.4
SOURCE: WWW.BOXOFFICEMOJO.COM
TheWashington Post is printed using recycled fiber.
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